“Her boss,” Naz said, circling a finger in the air when he added, “go back to that. Who is her boss if not the organization she’s—”
The lie slipped from his mouth before he could stop it. Another to add to the growing pile that he would eventually have to deal with. Luca would, just not now.
“They didn’t say,” Luca said.
He swallowed that proverbial pill. It wasn’t easy.
“This is bad.” Naz leaned back in the chair, staring at the ceiling overhead like he was waiting for the heavens to open up above him. “Worse than I thought—she’s a dead woman walking. Think about it.”
“It’s not going to happen, though,” Luca said, wanting his friend to know that at the very least. “This isn’t over, Naz. She’s not dead. Not yet. And she won’t be if I have anything to say about it.”
That had his friend sitting straighter in the chair, and eyeing him.
He avoided Naz’s gaze when he said, “I know the Donatis can’t go up against an organization like The League and come out of it relatively unharmed, but she might not need that, either. And I’ve got a leg up—I know she’s going after her mother. I only need to be where that bitch is and work from there.”
“You’ve gone from tracking her to protecting her, then?”
Luca’s jaw clicked when he clenched it. “Who else is doing it?”
Naz kept watching him.
Considering.
“Anything else you wanna tell me about Penny—and you, maybe?” Naz asked.
He should.
He wanted to.
Luca had no reason not to tell Naz what had transpired between him and Penny since he found her again. And shit, he wanted to tell someone. Anyone, because then it might make that real. The new loneliness in his heart was a real fucking thing he couldn’t escape. The constant worry and emptiness that wouldn’t leave him alone were driving him insane. It wasn’t fair that he’d dedicated practically so many years to something—or someone, rather—that he wasn’t sure would ever be his.
It only recently dawned on him that Penny did feel like his, in a way. As if that shit wasn’t terrifying enough. He’d always felt something for Penny, but it wasn’t the same now.
Obsessive.
Clawing.
Constant.
“Not yet,” Luca settled on telling Naz, “but I will. Soon.”
“But there is something to tell?”
“There’s something.”
One less lie between them.
Didn’t that count for anything?
“I just need a place to start, and I can find her again—go from there,” Luca muttered more to himself than to Naz.
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
Naz pushed his chair back just far enough that he could open a drawer in his desk. Yanking out a newspaper, he slapped it to the top of the desk and nodded at Luca to take a look. “That right there—published today in the Times.”
Luca’s confusion only lasted as long as it took him to get the newspaper in his hands. Naz already had the paper open and folded to the story on the third page—an entire article dedicated to exposing Allegra Hatheway as Allegra Dunsworth. Maybe exposing wasn’t the right word as the journalist simply connected the dots of the woman’s history, her former husband’s arrest for child pornography, and his subsequent death. There was a suggestion that the charges facing Preston Dunsworth had only scratched the surface, the journalist had written in black and white. Holding back only a bit.
But it was enough, he knew.
Enough to do damage. To ruin a reputation. To fuck shit up for certain people—like Allegra. Or even her current fiancé who certainly couldn’t afford a scandal of this kind with his high profile nature and politics in the way.
“What are the chances,” Naz asked, “that story dropped now just because?”
Luca glanced up from the page, meeting his friend’s stare. “I don’t believe in coincidences like that.”
“Me, either. And if this is coming out, chances are, it’s not going to be the last thing we see on the topic.”
Right.
“Penny is feeding information to the papers.”
Or to someone.
It would have to be her.
Who else would—
“Maybe she’s giving people a place to start looking because then she controls where everyone else is while she’s somewhere else,” Luca murmured.
Naz shrugged. “It’s smart.”
But messy.
And now Luca needed to figure out how to look through any distractions Penny put out to find what she didn’t want him to.
Luca could tell Naz was still pissed at him. Since they were kids, nothing had been off-limits between the two. He didn’t wonder why his friend felt the way he did. “I know you’ve still got shit to say to me about all of this,” he told Naz, “but we can get back to that at another time. Because right now, I’m running out of time to find Penny. If someone else finds her before I do ... listen, nothing good is going to come from that, man.”
Naz sighed harshly. “She’s not the same, is she?”
“It’s been five years, Naz.”
“I know, but ... she’s not the same, is she?”
Luca thought about that.
And what he could say.
Penny was ...
Better.
Amazing.
Dangerous.
To him, she was enthralling.
He settled on telling his friend, “No, she’s different than she used to be, but it’s not a bad thing.”
6.
Penny
THERE was something to be said for returning to a place where it all began ... at least, in Penny’s world. One might think the start of her life—good or bad—had been at the New Jersey home tucked deep within a gated community where her parents kept a permanent residence until her father found himself locked behind bars for his misdeeds.
All the horrors of the three-level Victorian home were hidden by tall, green edges and a manicured lawn. The luxury vehicles that used to sit in the driveway, and the picture-perfect image her parents presented to the world kept suspicion at bay from anyone who dared to look beyond the pretty surface to find the cracked layers underneath.
And even so, that had been where her life began.
Right?
Wrong.
Penny’s life started somewhere else. Or what she considered to be the start of it, anyway. Was life really a life worth living if someone didn’t know what love was, or how to love? Was life at all important when one wasn’t really living it, only existing?
That came later for her.
Learning how to live, that was.
It was also every reason why instead of returning to New Jersey ... she found herself back in New York. Or specifically, walking the bumpy, dirt path—one of many—that connected the forested area behind Rozalynn and Nazio Donati’s home and their rear property.
Was it too close for comfort?
Yes.
Was she being foolish?
Absolutely.
It was ... more days than she cared to count since she went AWOL from The League. She didn’t doubt for a second that her former handlers already had a small army looking for her. She was a situation they needed to get under control, and they would certainly try to do just that by whatever means necessary.